Chocolate

Silky, velvety and creamy on the tongue, chocolate not only tastes good, it’s good for you, too. Consumed in ounce-sized chunks or melted into marinara, mole or meaty chili, this not-just-for-dessert treat promotes heart health by lowering blood pressure and boosting your feel-good factor with pleasure-center-releasing ingredients.

“Dark chocolate saves lives,” says Dr. Arthur Agatston, an admitted chocoholic and preventive cardiologist at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. He based his claim on a 2006 Scandinavian study, which showed that consuming high-cocoa-content chocolate significantly diminished the likelihood of heart attacks.

Anyone who regularly ingests healthy forms of chocolate (high cocoa content and without fattening mix-ins like caramel, butter or too many nuts) reaps the rewards. Deriving from the cacao plant, chocolate contains flavonoids, which keep blood vessels clear and flowing.

Worldwide, people consume 3 billion pounds of chocolate yearly. Americans alone spend $13 billion annually on it.

Chocolate’s naturally-occurring serotonin and dopamine are potent antidepressants. That makes this indulgence a good alternative to cigarettes and addictive drugs; its quick, blissful high won’t hurt your body.

Chocolate 101: A Primer on Cacao Percentages and Kinds of Chocolate

Chocolate comes in two forms: cocoa powder and cocoa butter. White chocolate, milk chocolate and dark chocolate have distinct differences, but bittersweet and semisweet are pretty similar. Here’s what you need to know.

Dark chocolate:
• Flavor improves with time for up to 24 months.
• Twelve cacao seeds make 1 ounce of dark chocolate.
• Has less saturated fat than milk and white chocolates.
• Low on the glycemic index.
• At least half sugar and the rest cocoa.

Milk Chocolate:
• Usually half sugar, one-third milk solids and 15 percent cocoa.
• The most popular kind of chocolate, its flavor deteriorates after 6 months.
• Four cacao seeds make 1 ounce of milk chocolate.
• Must contain at least 10 percent raw cocoa, according to the FDA. The rest can be fat, flavoring and other add-ins.

White Chocolate:
• Made of sugar, cocoa butter, milk and flavoring.
• Contains no cocoa powder.
• The FDA requires white chocolate to contain 31 percent cocoa; since it’s cocoa butter, it’s all fat.

Sweet Chocolate:
• The FDA makes no distinction between bittersweet and semisweet.
• Bittersweet tends to have a higher cocoa percentage than semisweet, but that may mean beans are roasted longer, producing a bitter flavor.